Assassin's Creed is a series all about history - well, that and stabbing people in the neck. So, for the release of Origins, we thought we'd celebrate by delving into the history of the series. It's a lot less messy than doing the stabbing in the neck thing ourselves.

There will likely never be a better entry point to Assassin's Creed than Origins, released today. A prequel set a thousand years before the events of Assassin's Creed 1, Origins can be enjoyed as your first experience of the series.

Assassin's Creed's origins: A chat with Patrice Désilets about building the tower.

If there are moments of serenity in the original Assassin's Creed, which turns 10 years old next month, they are surely to be found in the act of scaling towers - a way of pacing consumption of the landscape that has shaped almost every subsequent open world escapade, from Rocksteady's Batman Arkham games to the mighty Breath of the Wild. The city is a fading murmur beneath you, the cries of beggars and traders and the jingle of guard awareness icons whisked away by the wind. The occasional frustrations of shouldering through mobs or scrambling across uneven rooftops are forgotten. There is nothing but the scuffle of toes on masonry and the rattle of Altair's sword in its sheath.

Whatever your stance on the humble moustache, mutton chops, beard or goatee, facial hair can be found growing with reckless abandon on a number of gaming's most memorable protagonists (and a few forgettable ones to boot). Once you delve a bit deeper, however, a pattern starts to emerge from among the bristles; facial hair is, basically, game developer shorthand for emotional development.

The story kick-started by 2007's Assassin's Creed will be tied up before December 2012, with developer Ubisoft Montreal strongly suggesting that Desmond Miles' tale will conclude next year.

"In Assassin's Creed we set up a timeline with this whole end of the world plot of December 2012," Assassin's Creed: Revelation creative lead Alexandre Amacio told Eurogamer. "That's fast approaching, and the story we have to tell, we obviously need to do it before we arrive at that point."

Ubisoft Montreal has created four main games since the Assassin's Creed series debuted in 2007, and 2009's Assassin's Creed 2 has enjoyed two follow-ups in quick succession with last year's Brotherhood and the forthcoming Revelations.

As we head into the season of sales, you'll want to keep your bank account tightly girdled lest you snap up every game under the summer sun. That's why we're here to guide you; we've got a few great bargains this week on some classics of the past few years, as well as some more contemporary greats.

Behold! Here's your essential weekly guide to spending slightly less on games than you might pay otherwise. Cheap This Week is a collection of the best deals from across the land every Wednesday; read on to find out which gaming deals we think are worth your attention this week. If you want updates about which games are cheap pumped into your web browser every second, be sure to head to SavyGamer.co.uk.

Assassin's Creed's Animus, the virtual reality machine that reads a subject's genetic memory and allows them to relive it as an ancestor, helped the phenomenally successful stab-em-up series to expand beyond the limits of the first game's setting.

Comedian Dara O'Briain believes the games industry should accept it will never have the "spurious bauble of mainstream approval" – and it "doesn't matter" because gaming's influence on culture is "more profound than whatever the latest Heat magazine-approved television show is".

According to a post on the game's official forum, the USA and "certain EMEA countries" get it a day earlier. "Please check your local retailers for details in your region /country," advised the forum manager.

There's no additional content to compensate for the wait, but Ubisoft has promised the game will look sharper on your desktop than ever before. There's support for multi-monitor displays and stereoscopic 3D output, while shadows, reflections, environment, character detail and draw distance are apparently all improved.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood has now shipped 6.5 million copies around the world, Ubisoft has announced.

Coupled with 10.5 million shipped copies of various dance games - Just Dance 2, Just Dance, Michael Jackson: The Experience, Dance on Broadway and Just Dance Kids - and the Ubisoft smile was wider than ever: €600 million revenue for the three months ended 31st December 2010. That's 21.2 per cent higher than last year.

In the six months prior to that - April to September 2010 - Ubisoft had made €261 million.

A new Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood patch is on its way, promising to plug a number of game-breaking glitches.

According to Ubisoft's Facebook page, the update finally fixes a notorious bug that sees you looping endlessly between the Animus and the present, as well as a problem that prevented some PlayStation 3 users unlocking Trophies.

As any self-respecting cash-cow knows, you ain't nothing without a few spin-off titles under your belt. Duly, it seems Ubisoft might be looking to expand the Assassin's Creed franchise beyond its well-established third person foundations.

An Ubisoft survey suggests that the publisher is looking into a number of fresh innovations for the next game in the Assassin's Creed franchise, including new customisation options, crafting features and a different lead character.

Did you know there is an amusing Metal Gear Solid cameo in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood? It's an apt inclusion really, because while it can't quite hold a candle to the eccentricities and convolutions of Hideo Kojima's labyrinthine stealth-action saga, Assassin's Creed is certainly getting there.

Let's recap. You are a man named Desmond Miles, who spends most of his days strapped to a machine called the Animus. The Animus lets Desmond relive the genetic memories of his ancestors, who happen to be an order of Assassins, locked for millennia in a struggle against the naughty Templars who want to subjugate humanity for the greater good.

Desmond was first captured by the Templars, who wanted to use him to find the legendary Pieces of Eden, objects of unspeakable power and potentially otherworldly origin. But he was snatched up by present-day Assassins... who wanted to use him to find the legendary Pieces of Eden so the Templars couldn't get their hands on them.

Rome wasn't built in a day. It was built in 365. While the multiplayer component to Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood has been in development for years now, the single-player game has been pieced together in just 12 months by much the same team as built the second game. And how they've used that time. When you first step into the Roman colosseum, it's another Damascene moment. The sense of awesome scale and craftsmanship that's gone into recreating this ancient monument is comparable to the first time you rode over the crest of the hill and saw Jerusalem laid out on the horizon of the first game.

Every year at the Eurogamer Expo we invite you to tell us what you thought of the games you played, and without fail every year (so far anyway) you exhibit amazing taste in huge numbers. This year's Expo line-up was our strongest and most diverse yet, so we were excited to see what would follow in the footsteps of last year's winner, God of War III, or 2008's Mirror's Edge...

Let's play a word association game. If I was wearing a loud shirt, sporting silly glasses and holding a giant foam hammer, and I shouted 'Assassin's Creed multiplayer!' at you, what would be the words that instinctively tumbled from your mouth? I strongly suspect they'd be 'needless', 'pointless' and 'futile', possibly followed up with, 'Where am I? What's going on?'

Ah, middle management. If you're good at something, sooner or later you get promoted out of it and have to admire it from above while you do something less innocent. As Ezio Auditore is discovering in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, it happens to the best of us.

To join in, you'll need to pre-order the game. Participating retailers are Play.com and GAME.

There is another way to play the game before then, of course - at the Eurogamer Expo 2010 on 1st to 3rd October. We'll be hosting both multiplayer and single-player demonstrations of the game at Earl's Court in London.

Ubisoft has announced the forthcoming release of a Collectors' Edition of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood.

It will include two extra single-player maps, a real-life strategy map of Rome, an art book and a special jack-in-the-box toy. Plus you'll get a bonus disc featuring a Making Of video, a sneak peek at the new AC comic, trailers and the game soundtrack.

So far the CE has only been confirmed for release in the US, where it will cost ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS. Those who buy the bundle at Gamestop will get an extra special special jack-in-the-box toy.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood isn't Assassin's Creed III, and it'll arrive on store shelves only a year after Assassin's Creed II, but it's set to be one of the biggest games of 2010. Why? Because for the first time Assassin's fans will be able to stab up their friends as well as computer-controlled enemies.

Sony has announced a bunch of exclusive tie-ups with third-party publishers to provide downloadable content, betas and limited editions only available to PlayStation 3 owners.

EA will launch special versions of the new Medal of Honor (12th October) and Dead Space 2 (28th January) that include exclusives bonuses. Medal of Honor will ship with an HD remastering of Medal of Honor: Frontline (remember that?), while Dead Space 2 will include a copy of Dead Space: Extraction featuring PS Move support.

2K, meanwhile, will offer exclusive day-one downloadable content for Mafia II on PS3. "Loads of new missions and hours of additional arcade gameplay," apparently. Mafia II's out on 27th August.

Ubisoft has finally unveiled the first of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood's multiplayer modes. It's called Wanted, and it sees the historical shiv-'em-up venturing online far more successfully than the last game's DRM ever did.

Wanted is available for up to eight players at a time, and sees you hitting the streets of Rome to carry out contract murders. Every match will begin with each assassin being given a rival player to track down and take out, and the game keeps tabs on who's the most deadly and balances itself accordingly.

That means that if you're handy with the steel - a bit like Warren G - you can expect to have four or five hooded menaces heading your way to mess things up for you fairly regularly. APB works in kind of the same way, but you can't almost certainly climb up guttering while wearing a ruff in APB.

An assassin's work - a bit like a postman's perhaps - is never done. Ezio Auditore's only just got back to his villa after prosecuting that whole blood-soaked vengeance deal at the end of Assassin's Creed II, and all of us a sudden there's cannon-fire shredding his bedroom as he tries to enjoy himself with a friendly lady. What a drag.